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Tag Archives: Robert Cecil

Lambeth was first recorded as Lambehitha in 1062. It takes its name from the Old English for a place where lambs were either landed from or else boarded onto boats.

Lambeth Palace

Lambeth Palace, the London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, was originally built here in the thirteenth century, and subsequently extended in the late fifteenth and sixteenth, under Henry VII and Mary respectively. The surviving Chapel and Lollard’s Tower date to the late Medieval; the Gate-House, built by Cardinal John Morton, to the post-Medieval, to 1495. The famous Garden was probably originally laid out in the late fifteenth or sixteenth century.

St Mary-at-Lambeth

The church of St Mary-at-Lambeth was originally built in the eleventh century, and subsequently rebuilt in the fourteenth and eighteenth. The tower of 1377 survives from the fourteenth-century rebuild.

Here are buried, among others, John Tradescant Sr. (c. 1580-1638), the gardener to Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury; and his son John Tradescant Jr. (1608-62), the gardener to Charles II. As well as being gardeners, the Tradescants were also travellers, collectors of curiosities, and joint founders of the Musaeum Tradescantianum, in a building called “The Ark” in Vauxhall, which was England’s first museum open to the public (at a cost of 6d). In time, their collections were acquired by Elias Ashmole, and in 1691 donated by him to Oxford University, to form the nucleus of the Ashmolean Museum.

“This morning about three at clock her Majesty [Elizabeth I] departed this life, mildly like a lamb, easily like a ripe apple from the tree … . About ten at clock the Council and divers noblemen having been awhile in consultation, proclaimed James VI, King of Scots, the King of England, France and Ireland, beginning at Whitehall gates, where Sir Robert Cecil read the proclamation which he carried in his hand, and after read again in Cheapside. Many noblemen, lords spiritual and temporal, knights, five trumpets, many heralds. The gates at Ludgate and portcullis were shut and down, by the Lord Mayor [Robert Lee]’s command, who was there present, with the Aldermen, etc., and until he had a … promise … that they would proclaim the King of Scots King of England, he would not open. Upon the death of a king or queen in London the Lord Mayor of London is the greatest magistrate in England”.

Elizabeth’s reign was widely, although by no means universally, regarded as some sort of “Golden Age” of – comparative – stability, peace and prosperity, of exploration and discovery, and of the arts, in particular the performing arts, bringing “Melody and joy and comfort to all true Englishmen and women”.

On this day in 1601, Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex, allegedly led an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the then Queen, Elizabeth I, and her court, a treasonous act for which he was later tried, convicted and, on February 25th, beheaded (at the Tower of London). Four of his supporters, Sir Christopher Blount, Sir Henry Cuffe, Sir Charles Danvers and Sir Gelli Meyrick, were also executed, on March 5th, although all the others, including the Earl of Southampton, were spared.

Essex had earlier been publicly disgraced and politically and financially ruined by being placed under house arrest and removed from his office as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, for failing to execute Elizabeth’s orders to him to suppress an insurrection in that country (led by the Earls of Tyrone). It was in Essex House – on the Strand – that he hatched his crackpot plot. On February 7th, 1601 he took a boat from Essex Steps to the “Globe” in Southwark to bribe Shakespeare’s “Lord Chancellor’s Men” to stage a special performance of “Richard II”, overplaying the scene in which the King was deposed, with a view to encouraging support among the watching crowd. The plan began to backfire on the morning of the fateful following day, February 8th, when four of the Queen’s men arrived to arrest him, and he was forced to take them hostage (one of them being Thomas Egerton, the 1st Viscount Brackley, the Lord Keeper). However, he decided to carry on regardless, and, with some two hundred followers, marched from Essex House upon the City. When they arrived at the gates, they met with a hostile reception, having by that time already been denounced as traitors (by Robert Cecil, the 1st Earl of Salisbury, the Secretary of State). At this, most of Essex’s supporters deserted him, and he was forced to return to Essex House, where after a short siege, during which he attempted to destroy any evidence that might incriminate him, he found himself forced to surrender to the Queen’s men (under the Earl of Nottingham).